Clinton

[Elle]

I do not see what the big fuss is over the FBI. If you are voting for her, you already know about her dumb email server. Any other year this kind of judgment problem would sink a candidate, but the alternative is Trump. The emails have been talked about daily forever and nothing came of it. Boy who cried wolf effect now. The women voters who would have to switch sides have heard all this and do not care. Nobody cares about Podesta's emails or Wikileaks. The politically motivated trickle of meaningless stolen info just puts emphasis on the "stolen". We all expect disclosures now, feverishly retweeted by Russians and Nazis. The info is useless. The FBI would have to show a direct link to a breach of info causing problems, or literally slap cuffs on her, and I think the latter might even provoke a backlash in her defense after all the crowds chanting "lock her up". We had a President who approved clear war crimes. We did not lock him up, and for a reason. This unbridled "get the bitch!" hatred is personally terrifying to me.

[poorpete]

Me likes this. Me wants your optimism.

[Cazmonster]

Is it wrong that I hope Trump is the one wearing cuffs before the end of the year?

[Elle]

No, but it would be wrong for Clinton to lead her crowds of adoring followers in cheering for it, in the same way the reverse is true. Screaming like a maniac for your opponent to be imprisoned, and promising to make it happen if you gain power, even though it's not even clear what crime you're accusing her/him of and s/he hasn't been so much as indicted for one, much less convicted, is disqualifying in and of itself. Nobody should vote for you, just for that. Yet here we are. "Tolerance" of the "other views" now means tolerating fascism, so I'm not interested.

[Stan]

Wow. This woman has survived one of the most intense and expensive propaganda campaigns in history. I hope her election will make some GOP strategists feel like total losers.

Really, the crap started getting flung in 1992 it was clear that she wasn't a housewife first lady. Then, when she started trying to lead legislative initiatives, the classic misogyny came out in force. She was labelled a bitch which is standard for any woman who makes males feel threatened. They also labelled her dishonest with little evidence and have stuck with that line ever since. Actually, fact checking organizations have found her among the most honest this election.

It was obvious that she was positioning herself for a presidential run as soon as she announced her senate candidacy. Millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on investigations which are nothing more than public show trials to generate sound bytes for simple minded mainstream news. She's labelled ambitious, which is very true. Yet, when men say they want to be president, everybody goes 'awww.'

This is the one candidate the GOP has been preparing to fight for over 16 years and they fucked it up because too many voters confused public message with party intent and chose an openly bigoted candidate over one who looks clean but who knows all the bigoted hand signals.

[Mike]

Don't speak too soon. She dropped from an 89% chance of winning three weeks ago to only 66% as of today. (According to FiveThirtyEight's model.) So yes, she will probably win. But as I've said before, playing Russian Roulette with two bullets in the chamber means I'm probably not gonna die, but I still am not at all happy with those odds.

We have five days, and Trump has finally started listening to his advisers and is keeping his mouth shut. They may still pull this out yet.

[Elle]

Ron keeps assuring me that not only will she win, but that it won't even be close. Apparently he and Obama know something I don't, or I'm just temperamentally inclined to fear.

Stan is basically saying exactly what my Mom has to say about Hillary, though she often adds things like "just look at how wonderful Chelsea is!" and waxes on about other positives related to Hillary. She helped campaign for her back in 2008. I tend to be one of the cynics who is annoyed that the Clintons take money in exchange for influence and favor - not that this is in any way unusual to them in politics, since you'd see every bit as much of this on the Republican side - and I definitely would have preferred Sanders to Clinton. But one of the most shocking things about this election has been that the voices of her active supporters like my Mom have been entirely silenced in the media. You hear SO much anti-Trump - and I indict myself in this phenomenon - but you hear almost nothing from the truly pro-Clinton group who thinks she's a tough, fearless, effective leader who will solve all kinds of problems and defend the innocent and defenseless most of all. That's how my Mom sees her for sure.

It also shocks me that people are judging Clinton so harshly based mostly on innuendo and oft-repeated active bullshit, when on the other side you have a long list of cold, hard facts about what Trump has said and done.

[akiva]

The image of Clinton as a ruthless, duplicitous and overly ambitious pol was mostly created by a conservative critic (can't remember who) in the mid-90s. When she first arrived in D.C., her reputation was quite the opposite: Republicans viewed her as a left wing zealot who was trying to impose socialism and destroy Christianity. Sometime around '95 an article was published (I wish I had the reference; I'll see if I can find it) that basically presented the image of her today. Much of the language, and many of the chargest against her, originated with that. So if the GOP has been calling her a liar and a fraud since then, it's not surprising that a lot of people feel that way.

This is especially puzzling and maddening, given how often Trump lies. Every fact-checker says that Trump lies far far more than Clinton, yet in polls more people describe him as honest. I don't get it.

Also, she's constantly accused of influence peddling when we have specific cases where Trump made a donation to a state Attorney General, and then that Attorney General chose not to investigate Trump University (Florida and Texas). And Trump has bragged about how he donates money to candidates so that they'll do favors for him.

[Stan]

[Mike]

You wanna feel better about the election if you're a Clinton supporter? Stop reading FiveThirtyEight and head over to instead. Both are poll aggregators, but FiveThirtyEight is very conservative in it's estimates, running 10,000 vote simulations and balancing the results, while Electoral-Vote's algorithm decides a winner in each state and lays out the map. And Electoral-Vote's map is much more positive. FiveThirtyEight's articles are dominated by "Why Hilary Should Worry" and "Trump's Possible Paths to Victory", while the top stories on Electoral-Vote right now are "There Will Not Be a Surge of Hidden Trump Voters" and "Early Voting in Nevada Dominated by Democrats". It's a much more positive picture of essentially the same data.

Sure Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight have a much larger reputation and far more resources, but c'mon... wouldn't you rather feel good for a little bit? Hell, maybe just check it out as a breather between panic attacks.


Current numbers at Electoral-Vote: Clinton 317, Trump 221.

[Elle]

John Sununu thinks it is okay to disparage Clinton's sex life and chant "lock her up" with a rally of Donald supporters, but apparently it's a bridge too far to say "execute her". Wow, small favors! Classy group.

Interesting fact via Fallows: "TV coverage this cycle, in aggregate, spent more airtime on the email “scandal” than on all policy matters combined."

[Cazmonster]

Since probably WWII, we've wanted conspiracies to be true. And, given what we know now about why Nixon started the War on Drugs and why Reagan approved of Iran Contra, America wants something similar from the Democrat side. And this asinine email server has been giving us a taste of what a conspiracy could be.

It's dumb that they used old technology and its dumb that it got exposed.

[Tahlvin]

My take on the e-mail: Yes, she was careless, but not maliciously so. I think it's terrible that the IT policies of a governmental agency were so lax that she got away with it without it being discovered and corrected; working in healthcare IT, I've seen plenty of IT policies that could discover and address this situation well before it got out of hand.

And while I don't think she should be prosecuted or server time for her carelessness, the fact of the matter is that there are plenty of other people who have been less careless with classified information, who do not have the high profile or the connections that Clinton has, that are serving time for their mistakes. So it certainly does expose a level of favoritism, but the proper way to address it is not to jail Clinton, but to free the others who have been wrongly prosecuted and imprisoned. And then get your IT department back to work on using available technology to prevent this shit from happening and to better protect our classified information.

[akiva]

[Elle]

Wasn't he the original private-email-server having Sec of State?

I'm shocked by what the FBI did and deeply afraid that the institutions we most need to remain impartial in defense of our democracy might not be up to it anymore. I live among batshit Trump supporters you cannot believe; apparently the local director here is cheerfully preparing for armed revolution if they lose, and that's always reassuring. I live in a neighborhood sprinkled with Trump signs and I didn't even know what a Clinton sign looked like until I saw one in front of the house where my kid's friend lives. I was so relieved, it's almost sad.

[Elle]

Great article here:

Nobody should have paid attention to that non-content FBI letter, but apparently they did, to serious effect. That dude needs to go. Ron says that's harder than it seems, but we have to draw the line at law enforcement meddling in elections.

[Tahlvin]

Glen Greenwald linked to a good article, and I don't have time to go find a link to it right now. But the gist of the article was that Comey had painted himself into a corner where he had little choice BUT to send the letter. He had testified to Congress previously, during which he indicated he would inform them if there were any changes. When they found the e-mails, there were changes to the available information related to the case. So he either informed them before the election in an attempt to be transparent, and be accused of trying to rig the election for Trump. Or he wait until after the election to inform them, and be accused of trying to rig the election for Clinton. He tried, in his fashion, to inform them before the election and to resolve the questions as quickly as possible so as not to have the appearance of impacting the election. But none of this would have been necessary in any way if he hadn't agreed to testify before Congress previously about the case. But for that, he wouldn't have felt the obligation to write the letter to inform Congress of the additional source of e-mails.

But I think it's all ridiculous. Very few people changed their minds because of this latest blow up. People who felt Clinton wasn't guilty didn't change their minds, and people that think she's guilty didn't change their minds, and people on the fence don't really give a flying fuck and want everything to just be over with already.

I think the most interesting thing about it has been watching people switch opinions so quickly about the guy. When he recommended not pressing charges, the Dem's loved him, but when he wrote that letter, they hated him. And it was the opposite for Republicans. It's certainly not the sort of climate that makes doing your job very easy.

[Stan]

[Eliahad]

Here's an endorsement I'm willing to share

[Elle]

There is no excuse for what happened, it turns out. They could have determined whether the emails were duplicates very quickly, and even if they had taken longer to check every possible angle twice, it would have prevented the intervention into the election we've seen. Granted, I don't know this myself and am taking the word of other experts on this matter, but at this point I've had the pleasure of hearing from actual experts who would know this, and they are certain. It's not even a close call. He rushed to interfere in the election, for motives only he can know, and it was a bad choice.

The FBI release was followed by negative movement in the polls for Hillary, though how much of that was caused by the FBI is hard to say. It was the biggest thing in the news about her for a while, but more importantly, during that same time period when any potential effect of the release was felt, Democrats started to suffer in House and Senate races across the board, and they haven't regained the same position overall that we saw before the release. So even if Hillary manages to hang in there, it might have damaged down-ballot races. Hope they're happy with themselves. History will not smile on this - I guess people don't much care about that, but if it were me, I would be embarrassed.

Even if there was no demonstrable effect on the election, it's unacceptable for the FBI to violate its own practices this way. Law enforcement is invested with special powers and part of the democracy deal is that you don't get to abuse them to influence elections. A scary precedent has now been set for the future, especially if no consequences follow. I include leaks about Trump in this judgment; this is not a partisan feeling. Voters know enough to determine whether they are bothered by Trump's choice of campaign leadership tied to Russia; leaking that an investigation is ongoing doesn't change that and only compromises the integrity of the leaker and the FBI. Democrats were not happy with Comey in July either - it's just that Trump was unhappy with him. But Comey took that opportunity to chastise Hillary's judgment even though she wasn't indicted, and extemporaneous moralizing is really not his job. It's unfortunate if he was a good leader in other respects, but he really needs to resign at this point. We cannot as a country say that it is OK to have this kind of thing going on in our elections. For how many years now has the guiding star of the Republican party been the effort to indict or impeach the opposition leadership? It doesn't really matter WHY; the goal is simply to find any reason. Obama must have driven them all completely crazy. I can't really talk about this anymore; I am deeply scared to take my kid to school if Hillary wins and I'm just not able to cope with that very well.